This nonprofit gets volunteers to emergency scenes in 3 minutes

On the evening of July 21 in Halamish, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, while Doron Mah Tov was enjoying dinner with his family, a few houses down the street the Salomon family was celebrating the birth of a grandson. They had left their door opened. That was how a 19-year old Palestinian terrorist entered the house and attacked them with a knife.

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Shortly after, Tov received an alert on his mobile phone. He rushed to the Salomon house with his medical equipment. He was there within seconds. At the door, he was received by an Israeli soldier who lived across the street. He had heard screams coming from the Salomon house and immediately ran to the scene, ultimately shooting the terrorist through a window. Inside the house, Tov found three people lying on the floor, blood pooling around them. Seventy-year old Yossi, the grandfather, and Elad, Yossi's son, were already dead. Elad’s wife and three children had barricaded themselves upstairs. Chaya, Yossi's daughter, died soon after Tov's arrival.

Tova, the grandmother, was saved by Tov’s quick actions.

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Tov is one of the 3,500 emergency medical technicians (EMTs) who volunteer for non-profit United Hatzalah (which means “rescue” in Hebrew). The Jerusalem-based emergency medical service (EMS) has treated more than two million people since 2006, when it was founded by an EMT called Eli Beer. Beer had been an EMT volunteer since the age of 15, working on an ambulance in the streets of Jerusalem. “One day, we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog,” Beer told an audience at a TEDMED talk in 2013. “Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem. When we got there, 20 minutes later, we started CPR on the kid. A doctor comes in from a block away, stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR. That second, he declared this child dead.”

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That tragic experience reflected what Beer had to confront every day and gave him the impetus to do something about it. At the age of 17, he got together with a group of fellow EMT volunteers, acquired two police scanners, and came up with a plan: they were no longer going to take ambulances to reach emergencies. Instead, they were going to run. And it was by running that Beer soon saved his first patient: a 70-year old man who had been hit by a car. Beer heard the call on the radio and dashed on foot to the location. The man was bleeding heavily from the neck. Beer applied pressure to the wound with his skullcap, stopping the haemorrhage.

Today, United Haztalah volunteers no longer need to run to every location. At their disposal are 600 ambucycles, a motorcycle equipped with a trauma-kit, oxygen canister, defibrillator and much of the same medical equipment that you can find in a traditional ambulance. Although the ambucycle can’t carry patients, it allows medics to get to an emergency scene, on average, in three minutes. They are able to perform CPR and stabilise the patient while waiting for an ambulance, which can arrive up to 30 minutes later.

"The EMS GPS dispatch system is extremely efficient,” says Laurence Ainouz, a board member at United Haztalah. “All medics get an app on their phone and the dispatch centre has the ability to send a call through the application to the volunteers in the vicinity of an emergency situation.” Only the three closest medics get the alert. Once they respond, they receive directions via Waze or Google maps, along with other information pertinent to the emergency.

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On 6 July, United Hatzalah inaugurated a new dispatch centre. “It was a four-year project,” Beer says. “It’s the most advanced command and control centre for EMS in the world." The dispatch centre includes a bomb shelter, an underground data centre and a central control room filled with screens where data can be visualised in real-time, powered by algorithms optimised to respond to emergency incidents.

United Hatzalah also has a Psychotrauma and Crisis Response unit. The idea to create it came from volunteer Miriam Ballin after an incident in 2016, when she was run down by a motorbike. “A volunteer arrived quickly and treated her until an ambulance arrived half an hour later,” Ainouz says. ”She later went back to thank the shopkeepers and neighbours that had tried to help and was shocked by how traumatised and affected they were.” Ballin felt that although Hatzalah was providing an extraordinary service to deal with emergencies, it was failing to deal with the psychological trauma caused by such situations.

Today, the Psychotrauma and Crisis Response unit includes 150 responders, all trained mental health professionals. Their job is to apply psychological first aid, a protocol developed by the World Health Organisation to respond to emotional trauma resulting from incidents from traffic accidents to terror attacks. “We actually respond while the CPR is still going on,” Ballian says. “Hatzalah is probably the first in the world implementing emotional support to emergency medicine services.”

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Such psychological assistance isn’t just a necessity to the victims, but to medics as well. “We’re giving our EMTs a chance to be human beings who embrace their feelings and are able to talk about the different experiences that they go through,” Beer says. “We have opened a clinic that is available any hour of the day. Our medics and volunteers are the most valuable resource that we have and it's our responsibility to take good care of them both physically and emotionally.”

At one point, during the night of the Halamish terror attack, Tov was helping the wounded when he was pushed back by a security officer who in the meantime had arrived at the scene. Tov wasn't carrying a bullet proof vest or a helmet and the person he was about to treat was the terrorist.

"Rushing to the scene of a terror attack is uncomfortable and scary, Tov writes in the United Haztalah blog. “So why do it? Simple. Saving the lives of others, especially if they are my friends and neighbours, is the greatest calling and the greatest responsibility that exists. There is an element of fear involved, I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t. We swallow that fear and we go anyway for the price of not doing so is too high to contemplate.”